FAQ

Your online activities are being monitored by multiple agencies in and outside of your own country. These agencies can see every website you visit, your personal emails, your political inclinations, sexual preferences, purchasing habits, and can even predict your future behaviors. This world of increasing surveillance threatens the freedom and autonomy of children, citizens, and societies by invisibly invading our online privacy. ÉlanVPN eliminates these threats through our advanced anonymity private secure networks.

The internet is a surveillance web. Treat it accordingly.

Your computer connects to our network, and we encrypt and anonymize all of your internet traffic to defeat hackers, eavesdroppers, and surveillance systems. This is done by routing your traffic across our international high-speed network of secure nodes, ensuring that your origination and destination nodes are never within the same country.

Privacy means that no one knows what you said. Anonymity means that no one knows who said it. Anonymity protects the who, where, when, why. Encryption protects the what.

Because the bandwidth costs are a multiple higher. Multi-hop VPNs must transfer every packet internally many times. Consequently the total cost of driving data across such a network is much greater. Good privacy doesn't come cheap, and really excellent privacy costs more. Our aim is to make sure that whichever plan you choose, you get what you pay for.

Not at this time. Deploying such a server is something we hope to do in the future. This would allow us to offer many specialized services in a public darknet environment.

Actually, bandwidth caps are making a comeback, although it would be unusual for a standard single-hop VPN. However, the multi-hop architecture of Élan's Max VPN entails a much higher cost for data throughput. We consider that most subscribers won't need more than the quota of 25 GB per month, unless they're doing a lot of videos. (If you'd like to estimate your own usage, we suggest this handy calculator.)

We could have built in a larger prepaid quota, but that would have required higher prices, and resulted in a situation where the highest-consuming users were effectively being subsidized by everybody else. We don't think that's fair, so we set the quota at a reasonable average. Of course, we're happy to sell you additional bandwidth a la carte if you need it. But honestly, it would probably be cheaper to buy a single-hop VPN subscription too, and then use one network or the other depending on what you were doing.

If you are a monthly subscriber, we will disable your account until the start of your next monthly billing cycle, or until you purchase a bandwidth top-up. If you have an annual subscription, we will deduct time from the end of your subscription, moving the expiration date closer. Don't worry, we'll send you an automated email to your contact address to alert you whenever your available bandwidth falls below 5 GB remaining for the current month. And we'll send you another notice if your service is actually suspended or reduced.

Mumble is an open source voice chat system, featuring high grade encryption. (We think it's better than Skype's, actually.) It's excellent for online meetings and conferences due to its high quality audio, and also for online gaming, but mainly wherever security is desired. It's like Teamspeak or Ventrilo, but with encryption. It does not support video. You can download the Mumble client here. ÉlanVPN offers all of our VPN subscribers access to a private Mumble server. You can use it with your friends and family, business associates, fellow gamers, or anyone with whom you share the hostname:port and password. (Your invitees also need to be ÉlanVPN subscribers.)

It's fine, but we suggest that you do it only on our Turbo VPN network, since you'll quickly use up your monthly bandwidth quota on the Max VPN network.

Seeding torrents on a properly configured VPN is not possible, and ours is no exception. (See our blog post for some discussion of this subject.) Downloading a torrent stream using Transmission or similar tools is permitted on the Turbo VPN, but is completely blocked on the Max VPN. Filesharing using DropBox, SpiderOak, and other similar services is okay.

In order to prevent email spam abuse, our Max VPN blocks access to port 25 (SMTP for outgoing mail) on all email servers except its own. (Many ISP's do this too.) In general, any abuse involving spam, intellectual property violations, or hacking will be dealt with immediately and severely (as in abrupt termination for the offender). This is the only way we can keep our service operating smoothly for everybody else. Please see also our Terms of Service.

Max VPN credentials can be used on multiple devices simultaneously. However, usage on all devices will count against your account bandwidth quota.

On this website, we presently accept credit/debit cards via PayPal, By special arrangement, we can also accept check or money order in US funds by mail, ACH payments via clearXchange, wire transfers for B2B orders, plus bitcoin, Silent Bitcoin, and possibly litecoin and Silent Litecoin.

Please see this page for a list of our packages and prices.

Because of the services we're bundling along with our VPN packages (VoIP, secure email and storage), we don't think our package prices are actually all that high. And unlike the case with some low-end services, our providers actually own their own network infrastructure. But if you're lucky you get what you pay for. Our goal is to provide you with enough value to make our prices worth paying, not merely to be cheaper than any competitor.

You can look at it this way: given that you're already paying your ISP probably around $100 per month or more, just for internet access, it definitely sucks to have to add another $15-35 a month to keep all the rats and spooks from spying on you. True. And if ISPs provided VPN security by default for all of their customers, you wouldn't need a VPN add-on for privacy in the first place! But they don't, and probably never will (ever wonder why not?), and so this is the world we live in. ÉlanVPN is here to help you make the best of it.

Initially this website will be in English and French. We may add other languages in the future. Use the French and American flags at the top right of our menu bar to switch between languages.

Our traffic logs include only the total amount of traffic per day per user account. No other information is stored. This means that what we do not log is more significant. Specifically, we don't log call metadata, originating source, e-mail headers, sites visited, chats, domain name lookups, or anything else that your ISP normally logs.

Yes. This importantly prevents “DNS leakage” where your ISP can see what site host names you are looking up.

ÉlanVPN's Max VPN product is designed for the paranoid. We have an international team, and have our financial, administrative, and operational functions segregated across multiple business entities. This presents a serious hurdle to external parties trying to coerce ÉlanVPN, while creating a robust structure that prevents internal threats. ÉlanVPN does not log, and is unable to discover the originating source of traffic in our Max VPN network, due to one-way cryptographic operations in our authentication system. We also run our own independent Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). We have never surrendered the identity of a client or their traffic in nearly a decade of operation, and we never will.

Yes, and for good reason. While this may be inconvenient for torrent users, the fact is that enabling port forwarding opens up a huge user security hole. This article describes the problem. While various VPN providers mentioned in the article try to claim that this is some kind of new discovery, in fact it's been known to be a problem for years. See also our blog post on this subject for a more detailed explanation.